He’s never really admitted this, but to my knowledge Fidel despised the Russians as much as any other Cuban did. The Cubans and the Russians are really chalk and cheese, but they absolutely needed that relationship and that alliance at that time. Socially there are not two types of people less suited to one another. It was interesting that within a year or two of the breakup of the Soviet Union there were virtually no Russians left on the Island. There was almost no memory, either; nobody even talked about them. They had been there for thirty-five years and then they were just gone. The only things left of the Russians were their rusting Ladas and a few buildings. The Cubans absorbed nothing of their culture—no food, no music, nothing. As for their ideas, they too went away with them; the Russians didn’t even believe in them themselves, and in Cuba they hadn’t practised what they preached. They were black marketeers. I mean look at them now; these weren’t socialist people. They were bureaucrats in an outpost of the Soviet empire and they sloganeered, by and large, because they had to or because it served their purposes.